Monday, April 18th, 2011

It is theologically problematic that Jesus decided not to write anything down. For thousands-and-hundreds of years, mistranslations of important Biblical verses misinformed the masses, and for much of humankind's history, most people never got to hear Christian ideas. It cannot be the case, therefore, that people need the Bible in order to fulfil God's plan. Tim Rice once had this idea, too:

“You'd have managed Peter better if you'd had it plannedNow why'd you choose such a backward time and such a strange land?If you'd come today you could have reached a whole nationIsrael in 4 BC had no mass communication!”

European Laws of Family Reunification and Muslim Immigration

It is about how in some European countries, Muslim married couples from some countries do not have to sit through the interviews that everyone has to, in order to import their spouse. This is because it is assumed that it is an arranged marriage, and that they haven't met yet!!

Not only is this reverse discrimination - whereby many immigrants are forced to follow stricter procedures than some (Muslim) others, but it also undermines Western ideas of morality, where marriage is a free enterprise with no element of compulsion. For these two reasons, such exemptions should be removed, and all people and all religions should be treated equally under law, as is the ideal in fair democracies.

Animal Sacrifice has been a Traditional Element of Religions since Ancient Times

Animal sacrifice has gone hand in hand with traditional and old religions6. The cradle of religion, animism, is rife with it. It is only the post-Roman Empire secular world that has fully rejected animal sacrifice. It remains in the holy books of the world's major traditional religions and is still practiced by many. It has in the past been a part of common, folk culture and folk religion; the resurgence of magic books, general occultism and popular belief in charms, luck, fate, etc, had led to a renewed interest in dusty old ritual magic. Will Emrish of the German Society for Protection against Superstition (DEGESA: Deutsche Gesellshaft vor Aberglauben, founded in 1954), who was also a former president of the German Animal Protection League, complained that "the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses had led to the painful deaths of numerous cats, chickens, moles, and toads by followers of its magical cures".

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

Slavery

Voodoo priests, slave protests and economics were the three powerful factors that brought the age of slavery to an end. They battled against organized campaigns that aimed to keep the trade going, with religious justifications centering on the Christian Bible. Christianity and Islam were the two worst-offending religions, and conservative Christians hung on to their slaves for the longest. China never ordained slavery, and the Buddhist Emperor Wang Mang was "probably the first recorded ruler to abolish the slave trade". There are some early anti-slavery thinkers, such as the pagan Zeno's Stoics (342-270BCE), but as there are so few anti-slavery movements until much later, this page simply concentrates on the movements that existed at the time when the major slave trades of the world ceased to operate.

And added a bit:

6.4. Christian Pro-slavery

Christians with vested interests justified slavery on account of their religion although the Bible is much less openly embracing of slavery than the Qu'raan. Christian arguments were used such as slavery facilitated the evangelizing of slaves, that black couldn't be saved anyway, and that certain Biblical stories made blacks out to be inferior and cursed by god - although no scholars nowadays interpret these passages in this way, at the time, they did. Bishops and Monks provided some of the arguments that were used all over to justify the ownership of slaves. The fact that god-worship does not lead to better morals in society is one of the factor that leads skeptical and atheist thinkers such as Victor Stenger to conclude that God doesn't exist:

“Jesus had many opportunities to disavow slavery. He never did. St. Paul reaffirms the practice: "Bid slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect" (Titus 2:9).

Prior to the Civil War, the Bible was widely used to justify slavery in the United States. Baptist leader and slave owner Richard Furman (d. 1825) laid the foundation for the biblical arguments that would be made in support of slavery leading up to the Civil War. While president of the State Baptist Convention, Furman wrote to the governor of South Carolina, "The right of holding slaves is clearly established in the Holy Scriptures, both by precept and example". [...]

While Christians in the South held onto their slaves as long as they could, secular humanist Richard Randolph of Virginia began freeing his in 1791. Popes and other fathers of the Catholic Church owned slaves as late as 1800. Jesuits in colonial Maryland and nuns in Europe and Latin America owned slaves. The Church did not condemn slavery until 1888, after every Christian nation had abolished the practice.”

Animal Ritual Sacrifirces and Kosher & Halal Food

World religions such as Christianity, Islam and Judaism all embody a traditional and sometimes bizarre set of animal sacrifice rituals in their holy texts. These practices, despite being borderline barbaric and not in keeping with modern ideas of animal welfare, are still in use today by religious communities all over the world, including in the most modern countries. Although it might seem reasonable in the West to allow butchers to sell halal food, at the core of this familiar label is weird ritualistic behaviour that belongs in the dark ages. The ideals of pluralism have blinded us to the stark reality that some religious practices are simply unacceptable. Animal rights campaigners have joined forces with moral activists to try and curb religious ritual slaughter of animals. The general public associate blood rituals involving animals with Satanism, not realizing that they were all invented and are still practiced by mainstream religions - and that Satanism does not involve animal sacrifice. We compare scriptures below and look at some of the gory and shocking rituals that God directly asks people to do in the Jewish Scriptures / Old Testament. As modern governments continue to legislate against cruelty to animals, we will find that it is the world's mainstream religions' adherents who retreat to shady basements and hidden locations to perform secret rituals to kill animals, rather than Satanists or Pagans.